Showing papers on "Antecedent (grammar) published in 1988"

Antecedents of Organizational Slack

Abstract: Organizational slack has been widely discussed, but only in its role as an antecedent of performance, political behavior, bankruptcy, and other phenomena. A model that describes the antecedents of organizational slack is presented here. It contains three sets of predictors: environmental contingencies, organizational characteristics, and the values and beliefs of dominant coalition. Hypotheses detailing how each set of predictors leads to the development of different levels and types of slack resources are presented.

Elaborative inferences during reading: do they occur on-line?

Abstract: Four experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which readers construct elaborative inferences on-line during reading. In Experiment 1, gaze durations were measured while subjects read anaphors to target antecedents that referenced a particular category member either explicitly or implicitly. When the context strongly suggested a particular category member, gaze durations on an anaphor were the same following either an implicit or an explicit antecedent. When the context did not suggest any particular category member, gaze durations were significantly longer following an implicit antecedent. The results confirmed that, with sufficient context, readers will generate a simple elaborative inference on-line. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 in which the materials did not strongly signal the inference but a sentence designed to encourage subjects to infer was included. In Experiment 3, this "demand sentence" was not included, and readers did not appear to construct the targeted inference. The results of Experiment 4 confirmed that once generated, elaborative inferences are stored as part of the long-term-memory representation of a passage.

Linguistic anaphors, levels of representation, and discourse

Abstract: Four studies contrast the processing of anaphor resolution for two types of anaphors: pronouns and repeated nouns. The studies suggest that in short discourses anaphor resolution occurs more rapidly for pronouns than repeated nouns. In particular, pronouns provide direct access to a conceptual representation of the antecedent, whereas repeated noun anaphors do so indirectly, priming a surface (lexical) level of representation as a preliminary to accessing the conceptual representation. In each study, subjects were presented with an antecedent-related probe (a modifying adjective) following two sentence discourses ending in a pronoun or repeated noun. Subjects were required to make one of three kinds of judgements about the probe word: recognition, category decision, or lexical decision. Facilitation in the category and lexical decisions was compared to indicate the relative Salitence of either conceptual or surface information about the antecedent probe. Results showed stronger facilitation in th...

On the causal information conveyed by different interpersonal verbs: The role of implicit sentence context

Abstract: The study reported here addresses the issue of why two different verb categories in sentences regularly elicit causal attributions to either the subject or the object of the sentence. State verbs (e.g., “hate,” “love”) predominantly evoke object attributions, whereas interpretive action verbs (e.g., “cheat,” “help”) evoke subject attributions. Different attempts to explain the phenomenon of implicit causality are critically discussed, and an argument is advanced for an alternative approach that focuses on the differential information these verb categories provide about the antecedent and consequent conditions of a sentence. An empirical study examining the inferences subjects draw concerning sentence contexts provides support for this contention. In the context of sentences with state verbs, inferences about the objects of the sentences appeared as antecedent conditions, while inferences about the subjects appeared as consequences, thus implying object causation. The reverse pattern was observed for sente...

Aspects of a Categorial Theory of Binding

Abstract: A great deal of attention has been devoted in recent discussions to the complementary (or nearly complementary) distribution of reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns within certain ‘local’ domains in languages like English. As is well known, within such domains, non-reflexive pronouns must in some sense not corefer with one another, while reflexives have to have an antecedent. This phenomenon has been called ‘opacity’ and in what follows we shall refer to it with the term ‘anaphoric opacity’ (A-opacity for short) to distinguish it from what logicians call opacity. A-opacity is interesting not only in its own right, but also because of the role it plays in determining what kind of structural considerations are relevant in characterizing admissible types of binding in natural language.

Antecedent Knowledge and Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction

Abstract: Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction (ICAI) is an area of artificial intelligence that has received considerable attention from educators. Recently, special educators have taken an interest in this form of computer based instruction, particularly given the growing disappointment in traditional computer assisted instruction. This article reviews ICAI programs as they are typically conceptualized and notes their shortcomings for students with learning disabilities. The remainder of the article discusses ways in which ICAI programs could be useful to these students if sufficient attention is paid to antecedent knowledge; that is, a structured knowledge of the important facts, concepts, rules, and/or strategies of a particular content area. The authors argue that antecedent knowledge is taught best when content analysis and design techniques are used.

“Anaphoric islands” revisited

Abstract: This paper reports two experiments in which subjects made timed judgements about the acceptability of a sentence or clause containing a pronoun that followed either an explicit nominal antecedent (e.g. … dreams … them …) or an implicit antecedent suggested by the verb corresponding to the noun. In Experiment 1 the verb was identical to the nominal antecedent (dreams), and in Experiment 2 it was different (dreamed). In both experiments pronouns with implicit antecedents were judged less acceptable than those with explicit antecedents. This tendency was more pronounced in Experiment 2. Furthermore, the times to make the judgements about pronouns with implicit antecedents were longer than for those with explicit antecedents. However, the effect on judgement times was of a similar magnitude in both experiments. These results suggest that when people read about an activity such as dreaming, they do not automatically represent dreams in their mental representation of the passage, but must infer their existence ...

A referent grammatical analysis of relative clauses

Abstract: Relative clauses have traditionally been said to have an antecedent or a correlate corresponding to a coreferent, missing, and relativized constituent in the relative clause (some representative works on relative clauses are mentioned in the list of references). Referent grammar (Sigurd, 1987) assumes referent variables in the syntactic representations of noun phrases and it is natural to assume that it is a referent variable, which is the antecedent or the correlate, not an individual word or individual words. The advantages of this analysis will be shown in this paper. The paper includes a survey of the main types of relative clauses with some typological comments. Swedish and English will be used as the main languages of demonstration. As Referent Grammar (RG) is formalized in Definite Clause Grammar (DCG), a formalism supported by many Prolog programs, the analysis can be implemented directly and run on a computer. The analysis presented in this paper is part of a computer program used for automatic translation by SWETRA (Swedish Computer Translation Research Center at the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, SWEDEN).